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.During Apple’s third quarter earnings call, CEO Tim Cook shared the following tidbits on Apple Pay: • “Tens of millions of users” are using Apple Pay. • Apple Pay monthly active users up more than 450% year over year. • Three out of four contactless payments made in the U.S. are done with Apple Pay, according to Cook. • Apple Pay is accepted in three million locations in the U.S. and in nine markets around the world. And the reality is: “The growth is astronomical, but the base is very small, …”—Tim Cook

Apple Pay—still a proprietary OS solution to a payments problem that simply does not exist …

Willam Hugh Murray, CISSP

I do not understand your assertion. Are you saying that there is no fraud in the payment system or that it does not rise to the level of a “problem?”

No, simply that the reality of Apple Pay is, as Tim Cook says, “… but the base is very small, …”

Where did I say that there was not any fraud in the payments system? Is EMV card fraud a problem? I doubt it. Regardless, it does not rise to a level of being a problem for point-of-sale transactions, and “MasterPass” and “Visa Checkout” (white label or otherwise) solve the problem for online/mobile transactions.

EMV is not slow in Australia; “contactless” card transactions are usually instantaneous, and even EMV+PIN transactions are faster that “swipe+signature”; then, maybe it’s just the primitive internet infrastructure system in the U.S. that makes everything so slow …

Willam Hugh Murray, CISSP

OZ! Now I am starting to understand. Things are very different here.

Tell me do your fast contactless EMV cards have the credit card account number on a magnetic stripe on them? Ours do. That is why EMV does not solve our fraud problem.

You are right that MasterPass, Visa Checkout, and other proxies (e.g. PayPal, Apple Pay Online) would address the online problem. Of course, with the exception of PayPal, a little more awkward to use than the others, our merchants have not adopted them. The brands have not promoted them and I suspect most online merchants do not even know about it them. Since contact EMV cards have not put a dent in mag stripe here, we have not yet seen the expected shift to card not present fraud.

If the brands and issuers had introduced EMV here when the did in the rest of the world, if they had introduced contactless EMV cards here, or if they issued EMV cards without magnetic stripes, we might not have a “payments problem” either.

We have both been guilty of projecting our situation on the rest of the world.

Whether or not we have a problem, paying with my Apple Watch is very convenient.

Here, EMV cards still do have stripes on them; necessarily so (so that I can visit the US—LOL) during such transition period; but EMV terminals won’t allow the swiping of an EMV card, so the mag stripe can only be utilised on a non-EMV terminal, which I think are all but extinct in Australia; one presumes that the mag strip will eventually go the same way during some later replacement cycle.

I noticed very recently that MasterCard is now claiming that 90% of their credit cards on issue in the US are now EMV; won’t be long before the banks that are issuing such cards will be giving the merchants holding onto non-EMV terminals a rude shock about “fraud responsibility” on “swiped” transactions …

We have had EMV cards in Australia for about ten years; and NFC terminals for some several years now; I doubt you could now find a non-EMV terminal; then, as we have only four major national banks and half dozen regional, the move to EMV/NFC would have been less problematic than in the U.S. …

I notice that MasterCard and Visa are starting to now more aggressively promoting their MasterPass / Visa Checkout products (my bank, the Commonwealth Bank, made the application for MasterPass as simple as clicking on “Activate” on my netbanking page);

There’s no way I’m going to trade in my perfectly functional Seiko solar watch for an expensive Apple watch—nor, indeed, an expensive iPhone; then, I’ve never owned an Apple product so I don’t see any reason to break that habit now—I’m just going to have to struggle along with fishing that piece of plastic out …

PS: Even with NFC virtually ubiquitous here I am still yet to see anyone paying with Apple Pay—or any other mobile “Pay” …

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